Competing Hypotheses
What is Competing Hypotheses?
When information runs out, the first explanation that comes to mind is usually just the one that best fits your own experience. Hypothesis testing means holding an explanation as provisionally true, deriving what you should be able to observe if it holds, and then checking against the facts. Five steps. (1) Put at least three different explanations on the table for any question that matters — a client isn’t signing: budget, delivery risk, or the decision-maker is absent. (2) Write the observable consequence of each — a budget problem shows up as questions about payment timing; a delivery worry shows up as repeated questions about support. (3) Go looking first for the evidence that separates the hypotheses, not the evidence that fits all of them equally. (4) Actively drop hypotheses that clash with the evidence instead of finding excuses for them. (5) Test cheaply — a pilot, an interview, a data comparison — before committing real resources.
Competing Hypotheses: common mistakes and how to handle them
Where it goes wrong: treating a hypothesis as a conclusion, hunting only for evidence that supports you, and holding a hypothesis that nothing could ever disprove. Preparing for a negotiation is the same discipline in reverse: stand in the other side’s shoes and predict their four kinds of objection — data reliability, cost, ability to execute, risk boundaries — and say under what circumstances you would adjust or stop. Naming your boundary makes you more credible, not less.
What the Competing Hypotheses questions test
supplying a second and third explanation for a phenomenon; judging which piece of evidence actually separates two hypotheses; spotting an unfalsifiable hypothesis or one-sided evidence-gathering; choosing the cheapest check that would still tell the hypotheses apart.